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Acoustically driven microrobot outshines natural microswimmers
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart have designed and fabricated an untethered microrobot that can slip along either a flat or curved surface in a liquid when exposed to ultrasound waves. Its propulsion force is 2 to 3 orders of magnitude stronger than the propulsion force of natural microorganisms such as bacteria or algae. Additionally, it can transport cargo while swimming. The acoustically propelled robot hence has significant potential to revolutionize the future minimally invasive treatment of patients.
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Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why (Bloomberg) - "The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time."
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Planting 1 trillion trees might not actually be a good idea (The Verge)
The World Economic Forum’s plan to plant 1 trillion trees is backed by controversial science. A study that claims 1 trillion trees can significantly reduce greenhouse gases, is disputed. “People are getting caught up in the wrong solution,” says Forrest Fleischman, who teaches natural resources policy at the University of Minnesota and has spent years studying the effects of tree planting in India. “Instead of that guy from Salesforce saying, ‘I’m going to put money into planting a trillion trees,’ I’d like him to go and say, ‘I’m going to put my money into helping indigenous people in the Amazon defend their lands,’” Fleischman says. “That’s going to have a bigger impact.”
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Parts of a realistic life cycle for soy biodiesel production - Screenshot from openLCA using processes (represented through boxes) from LCA Commons.
Life Cycle Assessment, LCA, own claims“Holistic”“Science based”„Avoidsburden-shifting“
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U.S. farm bankruptcies hit an eight-year high: court data (reuters)
U.S. Farm bankruptcies have increased every year for the past five years--with farmers retiring or selling their farms due to financial strains. This trend is changing the economics of Midwestern towns as land ownership concentrates into fewer hands.
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"Industrial ecology principles and system linkages" - graphics from the paper "Industrial ecology in integrated assessment models" - by Stefan Pauliuk et.al (video)
"Vision for integrating IE and IAM perspectives"
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Overview of Industrial Ecology
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Unsupervised Doodling and Painting with Improved SPIRAL (paper)
We investigate using reinforcement learning agents as generative models of images. A generative agent controls a simulated painting environment, and is trained with rewards provided by a discriminator network simultaneously trained to assess the realism of the agent’s samples, either unconditional or reconstructions.
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Artificial Life Models in Software - Book by Andrew Adamatzky and Maciej Komosinski
An introduction and guideto modern software tools for modeling and simulating life-likephenomena, written by those who personally design and develop software,hardware, and art installations in artificial life, simulated complexsystems and virtual worlds. This timely volume offers a nearly exhaustive overview and originalanalysis of major non-profit software packages that are activelydeveloped and supported by experts in artificial life and softwaredesign.
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Circado - The first cross-industrial trading platform for industrial side streams.
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Logistic Map Zoom (Fractal, Bifurcation)
A zoom into the bifurcation diagram for the logistic map. The Feigenbaum constant, δ = 4.669 201 609 102…, is derived from this diagram, relating to the rate at which the branches of the tree split. The graph is drawn by only repeating the calculation: a * x * (1 - x) to give a new value of x. Successive values of x, for a fixed value of a, are plotted vertically. More info here.
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Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP) (code)
Fusing classic interpretable DSP with neural networks.
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Otto Rössler (1940) is a German biochemist known for his work on chaos theory and the theoretical equation known as the Rössler attractor. Rössler has authored hundreds of scientific papers in fields as wide-ranging as biogenesis, the origin of language, differentiable automata, chaotic attractors, endophysics, micro relativity and artificial universes. In 2008, Rössler publicly criticized the Large Hadron Collider experiment in Geneva and was involved in a failed lawsuit to halt it.
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Google says its new chatbot Meena is the best in the world (MIT Tech Review)
Google.AI: In “Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot”, we present Meena, a 2.6 billion parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model that learns to respond sensibly to a given conversational context. We show that Meena can conduct conversations that are more sensible and specific than existing state-of-the-art chatbots.
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Japan almost a ‘sixth eye’ as Five Eyes keep closer watch on Chinese military, North Korea
"Under an expanded ‘Five Eyes Plus’ framework, the group – which comprises Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the US – will work with Japan, France and South Korea to exchange data on a range of areas, including China’s military, North Korean ballistic missile launches, cybersecurity and outer space."
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"In mathematics, the Feigenbaum constants are two mathematical constants which both express ratios in a bifurcation diagram for a non-linear map. They are named after the physicist Mitchell J. Feigenbaum. Feigenbaum originally related the first constant to the period-doubling bifurcations in the logistic map, but also showed it to hold for all one-dimensional maps with a single quadratic maximum. As a consequence of this generality, every chaotic system that corresponds to this description will bifurcate at the same rate: 4.66920.."
